Content is King

There’s no time like the present. Let’s start to create content on our new website.

Keep calm and create content

Your website will live or die on content. So you may as well get started now.

It doesn’t matter what your website looks like because Google in particular judges it by the words written on it. Nowadays, a successful entrepreneur needs to be able to create great content.

There’s only one way to create content consistently, and that’s to love doing it. If your heart’s not in it, you won’t do it successfully. Create content around what you are passionate about, and—here’s the most important thing—try to make this a habit. You have to develop your “content creation muscle.”

You need two things to make your new website successful: your passion/area of expertise, plus habitual content creation.

How to create content

If you go into the WordPress back end (also called the Dashboard), you’re confronted with links down the left-hand side: Posts, Media, Pages, Comments, etc. It’s good to get familiar with these.

Comments are the comments on your blog—no surprises there. Media is for images, PDFs, files, and those sorts of things. Don’t worry about these for now.

However, you need to understand the distinction between WordPress Posts and Pages. It’s very simple. WordPress Pages are for the important, static pages of your site. These are the About Me/Us page, the Contact Me/Us page, maybe a Testimonials page, etc. So the WordPress Pages here are the pages that tend to sit on your top navigational menu in the header area of your site.

The WordPress Posts, on the other hand, are for the blog. They are the updates to the blog that you’ll write frequently (hopefully). Blog posts are the articles you put out into the world that add value.

So, in the Dashboard, go to Posts > Add New.

As you may have guessed, you enter a title (a relevant, keyword-rich title that people are going to be interested in) and, in the box below, you begin writing.

You may write about your initial ideas for creating a website. How do you think you will help people with it? What subjects are you going to cover? What is the purpose of the site?

Sure, the answers to these questions may change over time. That’s the beauty of blogging—every post is date-stamped. If you want them to, people can see when you wrote each post.

It’s so important that you sit down to write, even at this early point, to start to exercise that “content muscle.”

What to write about

Get specific. Drill these subjects down into sub-subjects. No one’s interested in your opinion on “small business and entrepreneurship.” It’s too general. But a small group of people may be fascinated by your particular skills and experience, for example.

Don’t worry about being so specific that few people will be interested. You are aiming to be very interesting to a small group of people. Don’t try to be a little bit interesting to a large group of people. You’ll end up being boring.

Be yourself. You read great articles every day from some of the best writers of our times and you think, “I can’t do that! There are so many blogs out there in my niche, what content can I add that hasn’t been done already?” I understand. We’ve all been there.

But your opinions do matter. You’re you. And for that reason, what you think and what you say on a subject is unique. And the Internet loves uniqueness.

Don’t ape what the “experts” say. If someone disagrees with you, don’t be afraid; it’s the best thing, as that means that someone is consuming your content and having a reaction to it.

Talking about your own specific experience in business makes unique and relevant content.

Content needs to be unique and relevant.

So we’ve written content, now we need people to go to our website and consume it. The next lesson will be about social media, promotion, and relationships.